[887] Pand., L, v, 2, etc.
[888] Martianus Capella, an African who lived in the fifth century, is the author of the only self-contained manual of liberal education which has come down to us. His treatise seems to contain all the book-work a student was expected to do while under oral teaching by the professors. Cassiodorus has left a slight tract, but he recommends other volumes to supplement his own merely tentative work. Isidore of Seville, a century later, has also included an epitome of the seven liberal arts in the first three books of his Etymologies, but his exposition is almost as thin as that of Cassiodorus. The remaining seventeen books are a sort of encyclopaedic dictionary with explanatory jottings on almost every subject, well worth dipping into.
[889] Introduced, perhaps, by Boethius; De Arith., i, 1. Τετρακτὺς is found in Greek; Anna Comn.; i, pref.; see Ducange, sb. voc. The latter word is really the original and goes back to Pythagorean times.
[890] See Priscian, Partitiones, xii, Vers. Aen., etc.
[891] After Rome had produced good writers, such as Virgil, Horace, Livy, etc., they were added to the course of literature in the West; Quintilian, i, 8; x.
[892] There is some obscurity about his date, which suggests that he was a centenarian. Ordericus Vit. says he died in 425; cf. Cassiodorus, De Orthograph., 12, etc.
[893] “One father,” says Chrysostom, “points out to his son how some one of low birth by learning eloquence obtained promotion to high office, won a rich wife, and became possessed of wealth with a fine house, etc., or how another through a mastery of Latin achieved a great position at Court”; Adv. Oppug. Vit. Mon., iii, 5 (in Migne, i, 357).
[894] The details of teaching are presented most circumstantially in the rhetorical catechism of Fortunatianus (c. 450).
[895] Cresollius has brought together an immense amount of information on this branch of the art in his Vacationes Autumnales, Paris, 1620; cf. Kayser in his introduction to the lives of Philostratus (Teubner). Blandness of voice was sedulously pursued by professional sophists, and plasmata, or emollient medicaments were much resorted to. There was a phonascus, or voice-trainer, who paid special attention to such matters.
[896] Libanius has outlined very clearly the course of instruction through which he put his class; Epist., 407.